The School: The Alderton Junior School

Students at The Alderton Junior School have been developing their Enterprise Skills with Enabling Enterprise since 2014 through a combination of lesson-time projects, enterprise challenge days and trips to employers. Today was a chance for the school to dive into the world of art, architecture and construction in the Creative Spaces challenge day.

The Challenge: Creative Spaces

Today’s challenge was for students design the best community arts centre for their local area. The students would have to use all of their enterprise skills to work through the challenges of the day. In particular, they focused on Using Imagination
as they had to come up with creative but practical designs, and Working in a Team
to ensure that every member in the team had a role and felt part of the design process.

After designing and creating their arts centres, the students would have use their Sharing Ideas skills to present their work to a planning committee with the intention of persuading them that their design would be best for the local area.

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The Results:

Using Imagination was clearly a strength for students at Alderton. Student teams responded well to the challenge of adapting the design to the chosen location. For example teams choosing the river location included features like a glass floor so visitors would walk over the river or a nature-themed bride linking two separate arts centre wings. Designs also incorporated natural materials including leaves and twigs which had been collected especially for the day.

One Year 5 class welcomed a special visitor who was a professional architect. Some of the top tips they received included: how to minimise noise from the dance studio using special materials, but they don’t come cheap so teams had to use their problem solving skills in order to make their design choices.

What they said:

“These days are good for everyone – all of the students benefit from having the time to be creative and work together” – Teacher, Year 5

“We argued a bit but then we stayed positive and sorted it out and we aren’t going to argue anymore” – Student, Year 3

Well done to everyone who was involved.

Enabling Enterprise are working in partnership with schools and businesses to support students to build enterprise skills and aspirations. Find out more by contacting us or visiting enablingenterprise.org

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2 Responses to “Challenge Day: The Alderton Junior School and Creative Spaces”

[...] enterprise skills. The students have already taken part in a whole-school Challenge Day called “Creative Spaces” where students had to design and build a community arts centre from scratch using their Working [...]

[...] through projects such as Year 5’s Active Minds and exciting challenge days, such as ‘Creative Spaces‘ lately, where children planned and designed a brand new Arts centre from scratch. Today [...]